In this article, you will learn the basic principles guiding the formulation of agricultural and food policy in developing countries.
You will also learn those
factors that could undermine the autonomy of national food systems.
Guiding Principles of Agricultural and Food Policy Formulation
In a fundamental sense, the provision of food represents the raison d’etre that is, the reason why something exists of the agricultural sector of any nation.
Food is the only resource or contribution (to the economy) that is peculiar to
the agricultural sector.
However,
food and agricultural policies often differ from country to country. Bearing
this in mind, certain carefully articulated principles (or ground rules) should
guide the design and formulations of food policy to enable it promote national
development.
These
principles are what the South Center 1997 describes as the five (5) dimensions
of food security.
The
basic principles guiding the formulation of agricultural and food policies in
developing countries are:
1.
Food sufficiency
2.
Autonomy
3.
Reliability
4.
Equity
5.
Sustainability
Let
go to details
Read: Pre-Conditions for Agricultural Policy Formulations
1. Food Sufficiency
National
food sufficiency is attained when the food system of a nation possesses the
capacity to produce, store, import, or otherwise acquire sufficient food to
meet the needs of all its citizens at all times.
Thus,
national food sufficiency requires that a nation should be in a position to
determine her available productive capacity, and food import capacity (which is
related to her revenue) as well as strategically use storage reserves to buffer
the effect of shortfalls in food supplies.
In
most developing countries, food production is still carried out in the
traditional rural farm sector by smallholders with debilitating resource
constraints.
Thus,
assessing the productive capabilities of these smallholdings, and their
potentials for production expansion using improved inputs.
Usually,
optimum domestic production capacity is attained when nations adopt the
comparative advantage principle by concentrating on the production of those
crops that she enjoys comparative advantage in its production and exports,
while importing those foods for which it has comparative disadvantage in their
production.
Domestic
food production capacity can be expanded by the adoption of yield-increasing
technologies and practices by farmers. This calls for investment in research,
technology generation and transfer, and the requisite ancillary institutions.
Food
import, which is also a component of food sufficiency, is related to the size
of government revenue and should be used to complement domestic food supplies
strategically.
Food
importation should be resorted to when domestic production and stored reserves
are temporarily inadequate to meet a country‘s food needs.
Another crucial component of national food sufficiency is the maintenance of strategic food reserves in designated places throughout the country.
Nigeria‘s
agricultural policy devolves this responsibility to the various state
government.
Food
reserves or buffer stocks are necessary to complement domestic production
shortfalls, and to stabilize food prices thereby providing incentives to
farmers and consumers. It could be seen that increasing food sufficiency should
form an integral part of a country‘s overall development strategy and style.
2. Autonomy
This
is also a very important dimension of food policy and security. The principle
of autonomy or self-reliance emphasizes that nation states should not be
subjected to the dictates of other nations, transnational institutions, and
multinational corporations in determining the policies and rules affecting
their food systems.
Increased
national food sufficiency, if properly harnessed and managed can contribute to
increased autonomy. Nations with weak import capacity, such as unstable
revenues and volatile economies, may have to increasingly rely on domestic food
sources to enhance their food system autonomy.
Even
where national import capacity is not weak, autonomous food policy is enhanced
if international trade relations are based on the comparative advantage
principle.
Nations
should produce those foods for which they have comparative advantage in terms
of resource endowments, markets, and skills, and import those foods for which
they suffer comparative disadvantage in production relative to other countries.
Over-reliance
on food imports, especially of basic staple, can be harmful to the long-term
strategic survival of a country.
Consequently,
to improve autonomy, the long-term objective of any country should be to
minimize her dependence on imports of basic food staples.
The
following factors could undermine the autonomy of national food systems:
i. Food aid especially for genuine emergencies is often necessary on humanitarian grounds. But food aid to developing countries is usually prone to abuse.
Poorly administered food aid increases dependency, and depress food prices in the receiving country thereby diminishing incentives for domestic producers. Also, food aid can dampen pressures on recipient states to adopt necessary reforms and policies to strengthen domestic food systems.
These help to undermine the
autonomy of national food systems.
ii.
International debts burdens: Similarly, the burden of large foreign debts could
reduce the food system autonomy of any nation. Under this circumstance,
resources are preferentially allocated to the servicing of these debts, rather
than the provision of inputs, institutions, incentives, infrastructures, and
innovations for domestic production.
Moreover,
the necessary structural adjustment programmes that are usually demanded by the
creditors often favour imports and marginal activities to the detriment of
local production and incentives.
iii.
Intellectual Property rights (IPR): There is at present a new source of loss of
autonomy. The food system autonomy of most developing countries is in danger of
being further eroded by the new protection given to intellectual property
rights under the Trade related Intellectual Property (TRIPS) agreement.
This
was negotiated as an integral part of the 1995 Uruguay Round and administered
by the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
The
TRIPS agreement is likely to reinforce the trend towards reliance on patented seeds
purchased from large seed multinationals, thus adding increasingly to the costs
of small farmers who traditionally relied on exchange of seeds within the local
farming communities or villages.
The
TRIPS agreement is therefore likely to improve the prospects for profits by
large seed multinationals corporations to the detriment of small peasant
farmers and local crop diversity.
iv. Funding of international agricultural research: The present structure and direction of international agricultural research poses great threats to the autonomy of the food systems of developing countries.
Although developing
countries conduct agricultural research through their national agricultural
research system (NARS), most important breakthroughs in research have usually occurred
at the International Agricultural Research Centre (IARCs) whose funding is from
the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).
The
CGIAR is an informal network of donors, multilateral and transnational
institutions dominated by the developed countries.
It
therefore goes without saying that research agenda in these international
centres may largely reflect the perceptions and concerns of developed country
donors and scientists, to the neglect of developing countries interests and
expectations.
3. Reliability
The principle of reliability implies that the food system continues to supply adequate foods even during periods of seasonal and cyclical variations in climatic and socio-economic conditions.
The system is resilient enough to
withstand the impact of exogenous shocks such as natural disasters, climatic
changes, policy reversals and stoppage, and society induced changes in the
production and consumption environments.
It
is generally recognized that reliable access to food could be jeopardized by
natural disasters such as droughts, earthquakes, and outbreaks of pests and
diseases; and man-made ones including armed conflicts, sharp fall in commodity
prices, fluctuations in foreign exchange rates and earnings; loss of major
markets, or imposition of economic embargoes.
However,
a reliable food system should be able to anticipate, contain, and withstand
these forces and threats at least in the short-run.
In
essence, promoting base, especially the encouragement of the cultivation of
resilient and drought-resistant food security crops and breeds of livestock,
the prudent and judicious use of food imports and the expansion of a country‘s
import capacity; and the strategic management of national food reserves in the
overall interest of food producers and consumers. The role of the state is very
crucial on these issues.
4. Equity
The
principle of equity deals with distributional issues. The central issue in any
discussion of food security is the assurance that every social group and
individual in the economy has access to adequate food at all times and at the
right quality.
Globally
and in most countries, statistics have shown that there is already enough food
available to assure food security for all, as well as the potential for
producing a great deal more using existing technologies.
Despite,
this however, there is still widespread malnutrition and hunger, suggesting
that the root cause of inadequate access to food is primarily distributional or
institutional. Therefore, equitable access to food should be a fundamental
guiding criterion of food policy.
It
has been suggested that if the distribution of food is based on individual
nutritional needs as opposed to access to production resources or income,
perhaps hunger would have long been wiped out from the face of the earth.
But
unfortunately, this is not so. Except perhaps in the moribund socialist or
communist state, where the government intervenes to provide individual with
food on the basis of need, food distribution and the associated equity
considerations will continue to be an area of policy attention.
Market-based
food distribution arrangements should provide enough incentives to farmers for
continued production, guarantee fair prices that do not harm the pockets of
consumers, while not neglecting the food needs of the ultra-poor who lack
access to income and production opportunities.
This
is central principle of equity in food system. Equity can be achieved through
institutional reforms that reduce inequality and promote greater access to
income opportunities and production resources by a greater majority of the
population.
Such
reform measures might include a more egalitarian land are distribution policy,
land tenure reforms, income redistribution through progressive taxation input
subsidy for smallholders, and the provision of basic infrastructures in the
rural areas. All these should be contained in any realistic policy of agrarian
reform.
However,
agrarian reform entails much more than the redistribution of rights to land and
water. Rural smallholders have to gain education, health, access to credit,
markets, appropriate technologies, employment, education, health services, and
other basic amenities.
Developing
country governments usually involuntarily exhibit an unhelpful degree of
urban-bias in the provision of basic rural amenities in pursuit of equity
considerations may require the mobilization, sensitization and strengthening of
autonomous rural groups such as peasant organizations, community development
associations, coo-operative societies, rural credit associations, and clubs to
articulate the case for the rural majority.
Equity
and reliability are perhaps the two attributes of effective food policy that
encourage active state intervention in the food sector to remedy the
limitations of the market mechanism.
The importance of equity has clearly been demonstrated by recent observations in low income countries like Cuba, SriLanka, China and the Indian State of Kerala where public policies and institutions accord a high priority to the equitable distribution of available food.
There, the proportion of undernourished people
is low, in comparison with widespread malnutrition in several richer countries
without equitable policies.
5. Sustainability
The
sustainability of the food system is one principle that is increasingly gaining
currency since the United Nations World Conference on Environment and
Development (WCED) popularly referred to as the earth summit, in 1994.
Sustainable
development requires that the present generation should meet their food needs
from the resources of the earth without compromising the capacity of future
generations to also meet their needs. This implies that the current production
and consumption patterns should not in any way jeopardize similar activities in
the future.
In
this regard, environmentally unfriendly production and consumption patterns
leading to land degradation, desertification, deforestation, pollution, and
over-cultivation, nutrient-mining, over-fishing, loss of biodiversity,
atmosphere ozone layer depletion, soil erosion, pesticide toxicity, and water
depletion should be discouraged.
Furthermore, technologies and practices promoting intensive use of nonrenewable resources should be discouraged. Sustainability also has a social dimension.
The social
dimension of sustainability demands that production and consumption patterns
that create major social disruptions, inequalities, and intra-and inter-group
conflict, gender problems should be avoided.
Similarly,
an economically sustainable food policy should ensure fair prices and
incentives for all participants in the food system.
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